Citizen digital statesmanship: the "in-flight repair job"

An update on my "ghost court" effort to manage the risk from an unconfined IT failure

The silence before flight

I couldn’t do this “truth and justice” work without the support of my readers — moral as well as financial. There is always a quiet satisfaction when I publish, knowing the words go into the world and might do some good. When I don’t get to write, I feel the emptiness that follows — a sense of drifting away from the friends I’ve never met who see value in what I create. So having gone another week without a missive, as I’ve been consumed by legal drafting, hasn’t been easy. There are other things I would like to do in life beyond documenting the administrative lapses of HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS).

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When competence goes too far

My task is to present the High Court with the space that has opened up between administrative doctrine and hard statutory law in respect of the constitution and naming of magistrates’ courts. In a sense, HMCTS has been too competent for its own good, over-executing on its goal of improving throughput and reducing unit cost in the processing of low-level criminal cases. Rather than non-feasance (not doing what it was supposed to) or mal-feasance (doing the task wrongly), it has engaged a new category of administrative error — “hyper-feasance”: doing too much of what it is good at. In optimising for efficiency, the boundary between delegation of authority and derogation from law has been crossed.

Prof. Lawrence Lessig once observed that “code is law.” The software all around us implements societal rules, often disconnected from democratic consensus or accountability. Tech giants implement policies on content filtering that go well beyond legislative necessity. While defensible in private platforms, this becomes problematic in the administration of justice, where adherence to statute must be absolute. Errors in algorithms or database configurations can become faults in procedure — and those, in turn, can void jurisdiction.

Within HMCTS, non-statutory identifiers have crept into court names, hybridising the true statutory titles into forms that no longer trace back to law. This is a data-governance issue first and foremost — no evidence of malice, and arguably not even of incompetence. Information technology remains a craft industry. The systems deployed today were built with tools from a previous technological era. Even access to AI models that can ask, “Which statutes affect this code specification, and how should they be interpreted?” is a new compliance capability. Shortfalls are inevitable; this is not yet a mature engineering discipline.

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The collision of centuries

In effect, I’m asking the High Court to confront the collision of the Justices of the Peace Act 1361 with the age of artificial intelligence. The magistracy’s history stretches back many centuries, and statutes like the Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980 are modern restatements of those ancient structures. The introduction of centralised digital administration adds a new dimension, creating tension between the local accountability of the old bench and the demands of automation and scale. Standards for digital foreseeability and algorithmic transparency are emerging, but they are far from mature.

HMCTS may have run ahead of the authority granted to it by statute, effectively inventing courts by inserting entries into a relational database. That is not, in itself, shameful. Yes, HMCTS has breached its own data-validation and transparency policies. Yes, the consequences are serious: people have been summoned to what amount to counterfeit courts. And yes, the post-hoc justification that “court names have no legal meaning” or that “everything can be cured as a slip” is an overreach. But what we are dealing with is closer to an aviation accident — an IT crash — than a paperwork fraud. It’s the byproduct of doing difficult work in a complex system.

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Seeking clarity, not blame

I am seeking Civil Procedure Rule Part 8 declaratory relief rather than pursuing a Part 54 Judicial Review. Part 8 deals with matters of law rather than fact. It is a way to clarify what the law actually requires, not to assign blame. This is about surfacing the legal truth — identifying what the law’s benchmark really is. Algorithms should implement law, not constitute it. My aim is for the court to declare, in essence, “This is what the law is, and always was.” It’s an act of continuous improvement in safety culture, not a rebuke. Kindness over coercion.

This is an opportunity to restore the proper boundary between software and statute, modelled on the non-blame culture of the National Transportation Safety Board in the United States or the Civil Aviation Authority in the UK. Every plane crash paradoxically makes future aviation safer — an anti-fragile process of learning from failure. Denying or concealing faults, out of shame or fear, only ensures more of them. The task is to understand how the accident happened, what went wrong, and what must change. That’s why aviation created “Crew Resource Management” and the broader safety frameworks that analyse not only the pilot’s actions but also the maintenance, communication, and systems context. Justice needs that same holistic view.

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The digital Anisminic

For readers unfamiliar with the reference, Anisminic Ltd v Foreign Compensation Commission (1969) quietly redrew the British constitution. Parliament had tried to make a tribunal’s decisions immune from review; the House of Lords ruled that no authority can place itself above the law. That principle — that legality is always reviewable — is what I am now extending into the digital domain. A “digital Anisminic” means ensuring that code, not clauses, cannot oust constitutional law. The challenge is to do this while recognising that the court system is still “in the air,” flying with a damaged engine. Issuing millions of potentially void summonses under non-statutory identifiers is about as serious as IT governance failures get.

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Calm in the cabin

The situation reminds me of Qantas Flight 32, an Airbus A380 that suffered a catastrophic engine disintegration departing Singapore. The pilot’s recovery, despite cascading systems failures, has been studied ever since. Yet the most interesting part of the story is that of Cabin Service Manager Michael Von Reth, who maintained calm in the cabin throughout a manifestly life-threatening situation. You may enjoy this short interview, where he describes that composure. He was in a diplomacy role — representing the needs of the passengers, who in our parallel are the public.

It isn’t my job to fly the plane of the Single Justice Procedure. HMCTS leadership are welcome to spend their leisure hours reviewing how Captain Richard de Crespigny saved the day (here, and here). My role as a “safety-literate passenger” is to look out of the window and point out that the IT engine has malfunctioned — but that the situation can still be brought under control. The options are either to have a managed confrontation with truth (under judicial supervision via a Part 8 declaration or order), or an unmanaged one (through appeals and judicial review), or to live a fiction and risk becoming an air-crash movie. The engine has already failed; clarity didn’t cause it.

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A citizen’s repair job

That leaves me in a strange position: shifting from defendant in a minor motoring case to citizen steward of the constitutional order. With decades of high-end technology experience and a background in computer science and formal methods, the failure of referential integrity in HMCTS systems is self-evident; I cannot be fobbed off or gaslit. I seek no monetary compensation and cannot be paid off. All I seek is for the truth of what the law actually says to be surfaced, so the gap between specification and operation can close.

A bit like Michael Von Reth, my role is to reassure that this can be managed (with perhaps a short prayer before touchdown). My draft claim reads more like an air-accident investigation than a legal gripe — digital governance from outside the ship of state, not a challenge to it. It’s a prospective repair job, not a retrospective takedown of the lower court through an “omni-void” collapse. The doctrine is simple: safety is everyone’s job, and if you see a problem, you have a duty to call it out. The question is whether those in the cockpit now respond to the emergency. If they ignore it and the system crashes, history will not be kind.

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History rhymes

I’ve experienced one emergency landing myself. My father worked for British Airways as a maintenance engineer on jumbos at Heathrow, and we sometimes travelled on staff tickets. Coming home from Barbados in the early 1980s, after we traversed a tropical storm, one passenger noticed a crack in the wing’s skin. We did the full emergency-landing routine on arrival in London. I still recall the press in arrivals. The next day my father went to work — and was assigned to repair the very aircraft he’d just flown on. History rhymes, not repeats; I now find myself doing the same kind of repair for HMCTS’s digital machinery of justice.

The moral? Don’t deny a failure when the passengers can see it out the window. That’s when confidence collapses — and panic follows.

We, the public, can see the “ghost courts.” We know HMCTS isn’t following the statute. We know that misrepresenting authority on legal instruments is wrong.

Will those commanding the ship of state acknowledge the failure so it can be managed as an ordinary safety issue, or will they insist on flying on as if nothing has happened — until it crashes?

All we can do is pray they make the right choice.

And thank you — those of you reading — for keeping faith with me through this long, strange flight. Every message, donation, and quiet word of encouragement reminds me that the public still cares about lawful government and honest process. Whatever happens next in court, that shared conscience is the real safeguard of justice.

It’s what keeps this whole endeavour aloft.

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This article accompanies the filing of a Civil Procedure Rule Part 8 claim seeking declaratory relief on the lawful constitution of magistrates’ courts in the digital era. It is offered in the spirit of transparency and stewardship, not criticism or contempt.

I miss my photo walks. I want this legal fight to end. But that’s not my choice.